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1 Stud. Ethics L. & Tech. 1 (2007)
Medical Nanorobotics: Breaking the Trance of Futility in Life Extension Research

handle is hein.journals/selt1 and id is 94 raw text is: Freitas: Breaking the Trance of Futility in Life Extension Research Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey (2007) has suggested that one of the reasons we as a society invest so little in research on combating aging is because we are in an intellectual trance. We think the effort will be futile: aging is immutable, so why try? A healthy skepticism can be a good thing but it is a major mistake to bet against the irresistible force of inexorable technological progress. Over the next few decades, it seems likely that a variety of purely biotechnological solutions to many of the major types of age-related damage will be found and will enter general therapeutic practice, perhaps following the SENS program described by de Grey and Rae (2007). De Grey's (2005) guarded expectation is that all the major types of damage will be reversed, but only partly so. In several cases this incompleteness is because the category of damage in question is heterogeneous, consisting of a spectrum of variations on a theme, some of which are harder to repair than others. In the short term it's enough to repair only the easiest variants and thereby reduce the total damage load a fair amount, but in the longer term the harder variants will accumulate to levels that are problematic even if we're fixing the easy variants really thoroughly. Hence, we will have to improve these therapies over time in order to repair ever-trickier variants of these types of damage. I predict that nanotechnological solutions will eventually play a major role in these rejuvenation therapies. In my view (Freitas 2008), nanotechnology will play a pivotal role in the solution to the problem of human aging. It is true that purely biotechnological solutions to many, if not most, of the major classes of age-related damage may be found, and even reach the clinic, by the 2020s. However, we have no guarantee that biotechnology will find solutions to all the major classes of age-related damage, especially in this time frame. If treatments for any one of the numerous major sources of aging are not found, we will continue to age - albeit at a slightly slower rate - and with no substantial increase in the average human lifespan. Medical nanorobotics, if it can be made to work, can unquestionably offer convenient solutions to all known causes of age-related damage and other aspects of human senescence (Freitas 2008), and most likely can also successfully address any new causes of senescence that remain undiscovered today. Medical nanorobotics is the ultimate big hammer in the anti-aging toolkit (Freitas 1998, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007). Its development - as fast as humanly possible - is our insurance policy against the risk of a failure of biotechnology to provide a comprehensive solution to the problem of aging. Additionally, nanorobotic medicine, once developed, may offer superior treatments for aging, compared to the methods of biotechnology, as measured by a multitude of comparative performance metrics (Freitas 1999). If a 15-20 year -$1 billion R&D effort launched today could result in a working nanofactory able to build simple medical nanorobots in the 2020s (Nanofactory Collaboration 2007), then it seems likely 1

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